In recent years, Graphical User Interface (GUI) technology has been rapidly developed and becoming widely used. A GUI is a computer operation user interface displayed graphically. As compared with the command line interface used previously by computers, the graphical interface is visually more acceptable for the user.
A system having a GUI generally exhibits a series of objects (or called display objects) to be browsing or selected by the user through a display window. In many cases, there are many objects to be displayed; however, the area (size) of the display area is limited thereby making it difficult to display all the objects in a single page (for example, displaying all information pertaining to the population of a city through a display screen), which brings a good many inconveniences to the user's browsing and selection. It is difficult for the user to find the targeted objects from among a great number of display objects, and it is difficult for the user to remember which objects have been browsed before. All these will seriously affect the user's experience and reduce the efficiency for displaying the objects.
There currently exists some technical solutions for displaying a great number of objects. According to one solution, a great number of objects to be displayed are displayed in a single page with the use of a scrollbar where the user drags the scrollbar to browse all the objects that otherwise cannot be displayed in one page. A significant disadvantage of this solution is that if there are so many objects to be displayed, the scrollbar will become very narrow and hard to be dragged with a mouse, and the accuracy of dragging is greatly reduced (a slight drag will slide over many objects), and it is difficult for the user to determine how many objects have been previously browsed. According to another solution, a plurality of objects are displayed in the manner of paging, while a dragging function of the scrollbar is provided for each page. A significant disadvantage for this solution is that the user cannot browse all the objects displayed in each page at a glance after clicking the page, and it is still necessary to drag the scrollbar in each page so as not to skip over every object, which adversely affects the user's experience and reduces the efficiency of browsing objects.